Twitter strikes search deals with Google and Bing

 

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Posted on 22 Oct 2009 at 09:37

Twitter has struck deals with Google and Microsoft that will allow them to integrate Twitter posts—tweets—into their internet search results.

Microsoft is displaying live, constantly updating results in a separate Twitter section of its Bing search engine, while Google plans to include relevant tweets with all other results returned for any search query.

“That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information,” says Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products and User Experience.

Microsoft, by keeping tweet searches separate, hopes to make it easier for users to sift through the results.

“If you want to keep an eye on [a] topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in,” says Paul Yiu of the Bing Social Search Team. “Or, click on ‘See more Tweets about…’ to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to ‘Best Match’. Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

It will also aggregate links relating to trending topics and responses to them.

“To help you find these links we sift through and find the most interesting and hot trending links that other search engines usually don’t pick up on,” Yiu says, adding that, “Instead of the usual captions that are used for links, we decided to give you a ‘social caption’ and show you what people are saying about these links.”

No-one is saying how much Google and Microsoft are paying Twitter for the privilege of accessing tweets, but Twitter, which has at last found at least one way to make some money, is hoping for more of the same.

“We hope more working relationships with organisations in the search business will mean even more variety for users,” says co-founder Biz Stone. “Because of our open approach there are many ways to interact with Twitter, and there will be many more to come. As we work to mature our service and platform offerings, we also hope to develop meaningful relationships with companies that share our vision of creating value for everyone involved—especially users.”

Author: Simon Aughton